Here's a summary of what I've done so far. I installed apache, mysql, and PHP. Then I went through a PHP example that implements a discussion forum. Limited object-oriented capabilities became available with PHP4. With PHP5, I'm told, object orientation is available in full plumage.

So I'm reading Object-Oriented PHP by Peter Lavin. The last example I showed from PHP, MySQL, and Apache by Julie C. Meloni used only procedural PHP. I want to go through an object-oriented example and I chose the example from Chapter 6 of Lavin's book.

I wanted to stop putting everything in /usr/local//apache2/htdocs. I made the directory /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/oophp. And then under that I made a directory called chap06 for the example from Chapter 6.

What I want to do is describe what the example does and show it running; and then, go through the code showing how the example does what it does. The point here is that this code uses PHP's object-oriented capabilities.

I'm still looking at open source tools, trying to understand how it feels to work in the open source environment.

Here's what I did. A while back I started making web pages with C#, Visual Studio, and SQL Server. I started when the .Net Framework was at 1.1, and now it's at 2.0. Recently, though, I wanted to experience how one might do similar things on Linux.

Right now (this may change) but right now I'm more interested in development environments than in the end result. I'm not looking at portability or interoperability between Linux and Windows. I wanted to experience how it feels to work in one environment or the other exclusively.

 I chose to build a discussion forum under both Windows and Linux. This is a very basic discussion forum, by no means ready for prime time. It's just meant to be a structure on which to hang some design and code. As I've said so many times before, it's the journey, not the destination I'm interested in.

Here is a Word doc that describes how I set up a simple LAMP environment. I'm running Ubuntu Dapper (not yet Edgy, sorry) as a virtual machine on my WIndows laptop using the free version of VMware